Strange practices with room pricing - Silicon Valley
 

I do a lot of traveling for work to Silicon Valley at my expense, and I noticed strange things with room pricing.

When I book Sunday to Monday (1 night) or Thursday to Saturday (2 nights), the prices drop significantly at some properties. However, when I book that same week Sunday to Friday (5 nights), or Monday to Saturday (5 nights), the room prices go up a lot, about 2x to 3x even on those cheaper days.

Is there anything I can do to keep the expenses down in this case? I'm trying to avoid renting a place up there, and I would prefer to stay in hotels.

Book the nights individually or the 2-days for the nights you need. When you check in, have them combine the reservations so you don't have to check in/check out each day or every 2 days.

Cheers.

Welcome to FlyerTalk, st3v. Sharon's advice is appropriate for typical travelers. This is FT, however, where we're anything but typical! Especially in these hotel forums many of us seek to improve the benefits we get from the frequent guest programs. If I were breaking up reservations to get lower nightly prices I would also consider splitting such stays across two or more properties to enhance my earnings in bonus promotions and/or stays-based elite status. It all depends on the programs, of course.

Sadly, it's not strange, its dynamic predatory pricing designed to charge (& trick) you to highest possible prices across all weekdays due to the obvious demand.

As the experts state, do what best for you on a day by day basis then ask them to combine when you arrive so you won't need to checkin/out. Very common defense to this practice.

This is not necessarily true. As with many things, the devil is in the details.

In the situation presented, the key is the room type. Sometimes, higher prices over longer stays are merely because the standard room type is already sold out on the high-demand nights.

A lot of consulting folks do Monday morning flight out to customer, Thursday evening flight home, Friday in the home office or the "office" at home. Note this puts pricing pressure on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. Then combine this with the fact that some hotel reservation systems whether deliberately malicious or merely incompetently will charge the highest price for any of the nights for all the nights, and you get the behavior you describe.